Make finishing touches to your images in Photoshop with these tips and tricks.

The final tweaks that you make to your image can be the most crucial part in your painting process. That’s the part that you often agonise over, too. It’s easy to create art, but to perfect it is a whole other story. The adjustment tools have always been a part of Photoshop for this reason.

Long before so many other tools have been deemed important – tweaking your image in the closing stages always has been. They range from tonal corrections to colour-editing sliders, but they all hold their own uses in the program.

Photoshop adjustments: quick links

Everyone has their favourite adjustment tools, but while some people utilise them throughout their workflow, they’re often seen as a unifier of a project at the end. The adjustments are such an integral part of Photoshop CC, that it’s worth learning what each of them do. They work best in tandem with one another, but the key – like any part of Photoshop, including using Photoshop actions – is simply to experiment with what works for you, as many of the fixes overlap.

Once you’ve mastered these tools, you’ll never end a project without them again. We've divided these adjustments into four areas: tonal fixes, colour tools, creating a comic-book effect and applying filters.

Tonal fixes in Photoshop

01. Add an adjustment layer

There are many ways to add an adjustment layer. Either go to the top bar and click Layer > Adjustment layer, or add an adjustment panel from Windows > Adjustments. Alternatively, click the circle icon at the bottom of the layer panel. The Brightness/Contrast, Levels and Exposure tools give you control over blacks, whites, highlights and shadows in your artwork.

Click on the half filled circle next to each layer to bring up the Properties menu for individual adjustment layers. This will enable you to adjust each layer.

Colour tools in Photoshop

Once you’ve set the tone in your image, it’s time to edit the colour. While Photoshop can’t do anything too drastic with colour without the work looking distorted, it can provide useful edits to your image.

While there are plenty of tools in Photoshop to edit the colours in your images, there are just as many to take these effects even further. Black and White, Photo Filter and Selective Color are all tweaks that offer subtlety in your image, but can be vital for finalising the overall look.